The Obama campaign's use of sophisticated digital tools designed to oil its ground operation and increase engagement with voters on the doorstep could give the president a one or two point advantage over Mitt Romney in the key battleground states upon which the outcome of the election depends, his campaign manager has predicted.

Jim Messina, who heads an army of several hundred staffers that has been working for 18 months to secure Obama's re-election, said that the digital campaign that has been assembled this year to interact with voters is "light years ahead of where we were in 2008. We're going to make 2008 on the ground look like Jurassic Park".

"The Romney campaign are doing more than the McCain campaign did [in 2008], I want to give them credit for that. But they are nowhere near where we are on the ground," Messina told an event at the Democratic National Convention sponsored by ABC News and Yahoo News.

He gave examples from two important swing states – North Carolina where the convention is being held and where the Obama campaign has 50 field offices up and running while the Romney campaign has yet to open its 20th; and Ohio where the disparity on the ground is even greater at 100 Obama offices to Romney's 30.

Messina said that a two-point bounce in key swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Colorado could be decisive in determining the outcome of the 6 November election. "This election is going to be very close. We have been building a ground operation that will give us the one or two points that we need to win these states and we are on track to do that."

Messina's comments on the 2012 election's ground war were unusually direct for the Obama campaign. The Chicago headquarters that is spearheading the effort to re-elect the president normally avoids discussion of its technical operations for fear of giving away trade secrets to the opposition.

The Chicago team prides itself with having developed over the past five years, since Obama launched his first bid for the White House in 2007, the most sophisticated digital campaign in global political history. It is centred around a gargantuan unified database of millions of voter files which, through Dashboard, volunteers can access anywhere at any time. That, combined with Facebook and online micro-targetting of specific groups of undecided voters, has allowed the campaign to amplify and extend the traditional door-to-door efforts of volunteers digitally.

While Obama has put a large portion of his war chest behind the largest and best oiled ground operation ever seen, Romney and his Super PAC supporters have taken a more conventional approach of blitzing battleground states with largely negative television advertising. The outcome of the presidential race could in part hinge on this fundamental difference – a modern digital campaign versus a conventional TV one.

Ben LaBolt, the Obama campaign's chief spokesman, said that the president had an important advantage over his Republican challenger. Obama took the unprecedented decision at the end of the 2008 race to leave his digital campaign largely intact, redirecting it to help fight battles faced by his administration such as the passage of healthcare reform.

That means that he was able to start campaigning for re-election historically early. "We have been organising in this campaign for 500 days; while the Republicans were out there pummelling each other during the primaries, our supporters were talking to their friends and neighbours about the president's record and vision," LaBolt said.

While the 2012 digital campaign launched by the Obama team undoubtedly looks slick, many of the claims made for it have so far been unsubstantiated by any solid data. Messina claimed that the campaign has registered 150% more voters and knocked on 147% more doors this year than at this stage in 2008, though whether or not that translates into actual votes cast remains one of the big questions of this presidential election cycle.